I spoke to 120 people yesterday over 2 sessions about marketing and developing a web site that works.
As I’ve mentioned before public speaking is an excellent way to generate business, as well as provide some quality information to people.
For the delegates (people with a home based business) I spent an hour putting together a resource page they could refer to after the speech. There is a huge amount of free information for them. They know about this page because:
1. I mentioned at the start and the end of each speech
2. They received a handout with the web site page address and details
3. They received an email with the link from the seminar organiser
The feedback from the speeches was terrific and I’ve received quite a few emails today from people thanking me for the speech.
But only 1 person has viewed the page I set up. Just 1 out of 120.
Which kind of tells me the speech eitrher wasn’t good or that the speech wasn’t relevant to the audience.
Always Measure!
Always measure the effect of what you do. It’s basic marketing – I’ll keep checking how many people view the site and I’ll review a survey we’ve set up and I’ll spoeak with the esminar organisers for their feedback.
It’s only by reviewing the quantitive and qualitative factors of what we that helps us to improve our marketing.
Regards
Brendon
I’ve just launched a seminar we’ll be holding here in Queensland, Australia.
Check here for full details.
We’ve organised a email newsletter about it, have set up the web page and you can pay online. We have an offline flyer as well.
Our marketing so far (just yesterday) has been:
1. Send 200 direct mail letters
2. Mentioned seminar on blog
3. Made seminar a fixed feature on our web site (at www.tailored.com.au)
To come shortly:
4. I’ll be promoting the seminar in our offline newsletter and Tailored.com.au e-newsletter
5. I have a public speaking gig to an excellent target market in a couple of weeks
6. Leaflet drops into PO Boxes
7. ?? newspaper ads
8. A joint venture email with some organisations with the same target market
I’ll let you know how it all goes.
Cheers
Brendon
In a blog below I mentioned my review of Aaron Wall’s SEO Book.
I notice that Aaron has done a review of my review. And in it he says some nice things about me.
Couple Of Reasons
Aaron has done that for a couple of good reasons:
# 1: Makes me feel good and helps me. Which means I’ll be more likely to promote his book.
# 2: Makes him look good by having a web design ‘expert’ give his book the 2 thumbs up (even if it’s him saying I’m the expert and then going on to say I gave him a good review).
Links To Me
I very rarely provide testimonials or reviews, but when I do I notice that people are quick to add the testimonial to their site. Which means, quite often, a nice link to my web site.
Which can be a big benefit for me.
Can you give someone a testimonail?
Brendon
Follow the saga here:
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Here’s what’s happened:
* The client got back to me and accepted the quote without a worry
* We did the job
* They got back to me today ande accepted the quote that resulted from the review
They’ve been a delight to work with.
Billings so far are $2,700.
Sometimes I get it wrong. (Most of the time actually!)
Brendon
I try and avoid doing what I’ve done with this and the last post – refer to an article or post and then add a comment to it. But rules are made to be broken!
If you’re into search engine optimisation at all, then read this article – it’s a very detailed account of the factors that are considered by the search engines when ranking pages.
Regards
Brendon
Over on Webmasterworld.com there has been a post made about duplicate content.
It’s an excellent post well worth a read. It brings me a reminder of a site we had that was doing really well. So well in fact that we had to set up a duplicate sites to cope with Australian orders and a site for US orders.
Soon after the site wasn’t doing so well!
If I only knew then what I know now.
Be careful out there – one simple mistake can be very costly.
Regards
Brendon
Here’s the update for the situation I first mentioned below on 22 September titled Charging For A ‘Quote’.
It’s been a few days since I alerted the prospect to the page we uploaded that was optimised and achieved great rankings almost immediately.
I’ve emailed and spoken with the prospect – his boss was going to review the page and my email. I haven’t heard back as yet.
My guess is we won’t get this job – the longer a person takes to make a decision the more likely that decision is to be ‘No”.
What do we do? Our options are:
1. Continue liaising with the client
2. Wait for them to contact us
3. Remove the well-optimised page and move on
I’m going with # 3. My gut tells me this is not a client we want even if he does move from being a prospect to a client.
So we’ll move on and try band attract the clients we do like and enjoy working with.
Cheers
Brendon
One of the things I know is that I don’t know much. Like most web developers I’m always learning.
With search engine optimization I know a little bit. But the guy I follow and learn from most is Aaron Wall. Click here for a review I just did on Aaron’s book.
BTW, the page I did for the site below is now # 4 worldwide and # 1 here in Australia. Thanks to Aaron ;o)
Cheers
Brendon
In the case I detailed below this has been the follow up.
On Wednesday afternoon I quickly optimised a page for this company’s most desired key word. Others had worked on their site and gotten nowhere over the past couple of years.
48 hours after I uploaded the optimised page the page is # 5 on Google.com. I emailed the prospect to let him know.
Here’s The Math
The site would generate probably 8 leads a day (based on a whole lot of information I’ve gathered) if they have good search engine rankings. They should close at least 1 sale a day.
Average sale is $3,000.
So with some decent search engine optimisation this site can generate an additional $1 million in revenue for the company. At present it generates approximately $6,000 a year.
Let’s see what happens from here.
Brendon
(I’ve just posted this on my Tailored Consulting web site but thought it would make more sense here.)
In the last issue of the SitePoint Tribune (that’s the newsletter I write for SitePoint) I wrote about the hard copy newsletter I write for clients of Tailored Consulting. This newsletter works wonders for us in generating new business – this is what I wrote:
“Well, firstly I think people are far more likely to read printed material because they don’t receive a lot of it. I’m sure I’m like a lot of people: I get so many emails that any message would have to be darn good to be read amongst all the clutter.
I also feel that, because a hard copy newsletter is a tangible and ‘real’ thing, people are reluctant to toss it out. ‘If it’s printed it must be worth reading,’ seems to be the thinking.”
The other reason more people buy from the hard copy newsletter is because they already know us personally and have often bought from us before.
I’ve had a few people email and ask what the hard copy newsletter is about. I’ve converted it into a pdf file – it’s here (it’s just 89 kb).
Why It’s Formatted Like That
By the way, it is formatted like it is because we simply print it in black into our colurful newsletter ‘shell’ – saves us hundreds of dollars in printing costs and we get very professional looking newsletter.
Read here for more details on how we do that.
Hope that is of some interest.
Brendon